Lena S. Bolliger
NLP and machine learning researcher with expertise in large language models, generative modeling, and human–AI alignment. Currently researching latent reasoning in large language models.
About
Hi, I'm Lena 👋 I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Zurich at the Department of Computational Linguistics, supervised by Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger and Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich. My research focuses on the cognitive enhancement of language models, the generative modeling of eye movements in reading by means of diffusion models, and human-AI alignment.
Currently, I'm working as a Research Intern at Huawei in London, supervised by Gerasimos Lampouras and Victor Prokhorov, where I work on improving LLMs' language understanding by inserting dynamic latent tokens.
Beyond research and AI, I am a passionate classical pianist, playing since the age of three, and am a windsurfing addict, having worked as windsurfing instructor during summer seasons.
Publications
Wave 2 of the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO): New text reading data across languages
Nature Scientific Data, 2025
Proxy-Based Pre-Training for Eye-Tracking Applications
ACM HCI/ETRA 2025
New data on text reading in English as a second language: The Wave 2 expansion of the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO)
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2025
On the Alignment of LM Language Generation and Human Language Comprehension
EMNLP/BlackboxNLP 2024
EMTeC: A Corpus of Eye Movements on Machine-Generated Texts
Behavior Research Methods
Experience
Research Intern
Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, London
Working on improving LLMs' language understanding abilities and efficiency by inserting latent tokens.
Ph.D. Candidate & Research Assistant
University of Zurich
Research on cognitive enhancement of LLMs, generative modeling of eye movements, and human-AI alignment. Implemented ScanDL and ScanDL 2.0 diffusion models. Collected a large-scale eye-tracking dataset of human reading behavior on machine-generated texts (EMTeC).
Lecturer
University of Zurich
Designed and taught "Mathematics for Computational Linguistics II" and "Cognitively Enhanced NLP" courses.
Teaching
Teaching Assistant
Eye tracking: Experiment design and machine learning methods
University of Zurich
Teaching Assistant
Quantitative Methods
University of Zurich